I
There is, I am persuaded, a tendency in many of us to reckon too absorbedly our own difficulties and to give but scant regard to the difficulties of others. This I have observed frequently, not only in our associations with those of our own kind, but very especially in our relations with creatures that we assume to be of a lower order than ourselves.
I believe my own opportunity for observing the difficulties and disappointments of certain members of the animal kingdom to have been somewhat exceptional. It first came to me by way of residence in a very delightful house in the country, in which it was my privilege to live. It is an old house, as age goes in America, eighty or more years having passed over the oldest of its low gables. Before we came to it, the owner had not lived in it for many years. People had camped there from time to time; it had served during one summer as sanctuary to some episcopal nuns, who set up a chapel in one of its twenty-two rooms, and tinkled matins and vespers in and out of its twilit chambers; but they remained a short two months only and then went on again, they and their chanted services, leaving it voiceless and tenantless—tenantless, that is, as to human kind.
When we came to it there were many problems, difficult enough, certainly, to be met before the beautiful old rooms of pleasing and aristocratical proportions could be made comfortable and livable. But I know now that I reckoned these problems far too curiously, and with too scant regard for the far greater difficulties that our advent must have put upon all the shy creature-folk who had up to that time found the old place convenient and habitable enough.
In front of the house a wide brook brawls, or pauses in little pools, to meditate under the hazel light of the birches and maples of a most lovely woodland. Into this woodland the long veranda, running the length of the house, faces directly. It is but a step—say, rather, the mere dip of a wing—from the branches of the trees to the more sheltered safety of those cornices and crevices of pillar and window-frame where nests may be built so commodiously, away from storm and uncertainty of many kinds; so, too, it is but a step, or let us say a mere flying-squirrel-leap, from the drooping wood branches to the mossy veranda roof, and thence a swift squirrel-run, of no distance at all, along the varied eaves, and under them where secret openings offer, and then but a flash of four-footed speed, to the inviting safety and quiet of the old rafter attic—an ideal place to raise baby squirrels.
When we arrived that day, the house was occupied, at its edges and corners, and even between its closed attic shutters, by birds of every householding and houseloving variety; and in between its many walls, and in its upper rooms and closets and air-chambers and low, long attic, by squirrels and chipmunks; and here, there, and everywhere, as we learned later, in all manner of unobservable but plainly audible places, by mice.
At the time I was not aware of the completeness of this occupancy; but looking back now with full knowledge, I have a sense of shame and crudeness as I think what our coming must have meant to all those many denizens of that long, rambling, quiet old mansion. I had then, it must be remembered, not a thought of them. We were reckoning so absorbedly all our own difficulties and discomforts of moving attendant on our arrival, that we gave not so much as a thought to their calamities of withdrawal.
The birds were the first to go. I remember the frightened dart of one of them close to my face when I first stepped from the front hall on to the veranda. Such a frightened whirr and clipping and cutting of the air to get through it and away, as if a panic had seized her. And another on the branches just beyond the veranda, on her way, no doubt, back to her nest on the window-casing, where now she dared not alight. Such incredulous flitting from branch to branch, such twitching of tail and wings, such anxious twitterings and turnings of the head, such bird exclamations! Then she spread her wings and flew away, no doubt to circulate the news. What Huns and Vandals had entered on her possessions and threatened the country of her safety!
I think the first week, certainly the second, at most, saw all the birds gone. The squirrels and chipmunks, too, though they stayed on a trifle later, were not long in departing. There were councils and hurried scamperings, hushed pauses, and now and then—when I got an actual glimpse of one of them—an attitude of intent listening, a tiny paw held dangling in front of a visibly beating heart; then the quick, noiseless drop to all-fours, the drooped tail, the flash of speed; then the leap into leafy invisibility—only the branches left swaying, remembering.
We had an Irish cook, who called all this tribe—red squirrels, gray squirrels, and chipmunks,—indiscriminately "the munks."
"God bless us! Look at the munks, mum! How they do race and carry on!"
She came to me the second morning, after what I take to have been a sleepless night. "Did you hear last night, mum? 'Twas a shame to any decent house. And but for its bein' here in this heathen country, at the back of God's field, and not a Christian locomotive to be had for miles, I'd pack up and be gone before I'd stand another night of their riotin'! I can't stand the rakish things, mum." The last in a high, nervous key.
"What is it you cannot stand?"
"The munks, mum!"
It was she, a devout daughter of the Church, who had said it. I made no amendment; I only, I am sorry to say, offered her as consolation this:—
"Don't worry about them. They will not stay now we are here. They will find other homes for themselves."
Yes, I said just that, and gave it to her for consolation.